Diana Hendry grew up by the sea and has worked as a journalist, English teacher and tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Her poetry has won a number of awards including first prize in the 1996 Housman Society Competition. From 1997-1998 she was Writer in Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary. She has published more than thirty books for children, including a junior novel, Harvey Angell which won a Whitbread Award in 1991. She also writes adult short stories, a number of which have been published in anthologies and read on Radio 4. She lives in Edinburgh.

Borderers, Diana Hendry's second collection, features a number of poems based on her experience of working with cancer patients at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary. It is not only the borders between life and death that are explored in this volume. There are poems here about cultural and geographic borders, the border between youth and age, love and lust, the strange and the familiar and that final uncrossable border represented by the 'Mysteries' of the last group of poems.

About Diana Hendry's first collection, Making Blue:

“There is energy, variety wit and invention. The sort of book that, when one gets to the last poem, causes you to go back again immediately to the beginning . . . I liked the differing range, the effect of small against large, the small with a Basho-like compactness and elegance, the large, or larger, so thoroughly in command . . .”Charles Tomlinson.

“. . . the fresh eye that shines in her children's novels . . . is even more alert in these heart-searchings for grown-ups.”William Scammell, The Independent on Sunday.

“Her poems focus unsentimentally on the fragile nature of love and our human inadequacy in expressing and coping with its demands… That gap between what is felt and what is said - the limitations of language - is very much a subtext of Making Blue.”Anna Crowe, Lines Review.

They take their time. Linger, on the border,like women who go weeks beyond full termor those who climb to the top of the cliffthen hesitate. What keeps them?What holds them back? A toughand worldly umbilical cord perhaps ormaybe the delay's at the other endand they're caught in an out-patients queuetheir names not called.

and grief, while they, the borderers,cling on. Is what looks like dreaminga final drama? Are they backin childhood's summer? Do they strugglewith demons? Are they being shrivenby an advance party of angels?

It's like that moment when,seeing off friends at the airport,you're allowed no further. We wait

for the end, for the gentle finishing touch.I'd like to think it's a rush of love to the brain,then out. But when it's over, dream done,breath drawn, it's us who're left in the dark.